Wondering if there are any other Web Mapping Services based in Europe or even Asia?
Fed up with the Bings and Googles and even OSMs of the WMS world.
This is 2012 not 2002, shouldn't we have a much better FREE view of the world by now?

3 Answers
3

You mention lack of scaleability, coverage issues with satellite data and holes in data.

Satellite data (for the whole world) comes at a huge cost to acquire, and you want it for free? Something has to give. These are all issues not related to the map providers, they are satellite imagery provider specific.

You want free satellite imagery at good scale for the entire world? So do I. This data is acquired by the providers, then paid for through subscription and data sales. Until someone finds a cost model that is different (ie Google acquires their own and pays via advertising, or governments pay for imagery is release it freely) this isn't going to change.

If you are more interested in the vector data obtained from satellite (or other means) and Google / Bing / OSM are not your cup of tea, there are other ways to render the OSM data. Some existing solutions are MapQuest which offers tiles based on both commercial and OSM data. Another option is something like MapBox, which have a number of pre built sets of tiles using OSM, along with products that allow you to build your own. The beauty of OSM is that if you find holes in the data, you can fix it yourself.

I wonder if arcgis.com will ever offer something like this: GeoEye Receives U.S. Government Contract Award for New Web Mapping Service GeoEye's dissemination system provides users secure access to unclassified, high-resolution color imagery of an entire country over the Web. gisuser.com/content/view/20273/132
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Open Source LoverJun 5 '12 at 13:40